Americas 15th October Up!

[binary solo]

The_Joker_Product said:

kowenicki said:

The_Joker_Product said:

Myrmi said:

The_Joker_Product said:

Myrmi said:

The_Joker_Product said:

jugon21 said:

Week Ending 08th Oct 2011

	WII	XBOX 360	PS3
BEFORE	88,376,050	56,546,401	53,479,932
NOW	88,376,050	56,603,263	53,555,446
Adjustements	0	+56,862	+75,514

Wasnt the Xbox supposed to be undertracked by 26,000 and PS3 by 100,000......

LOL? is that suppose to be the adjustment from last month?

Oh yeah i guess it was, but the gap between the 2 hasnt decreased by 74,000 like it was supposed to be.

SO they increase the console who is less undertracked more and the console who is heavily undertracked less? XD

It looks that way.

actually no

the 360 is actually more undertracked by VGC (when comparing to NPD) than the PS3 is YTD. 

So what this video game sales tracking site doesnt actually bother to correct the proper numbers and purposefully leaves them wrong and inaccurate?

In the interests of transparency and credibility I do wish VGC would put out an adjustments "press release" and at least say what, in general terms, is behind the adjustments and which markets the adjustments cover.

Sure these adjustments seem to be from NPD but there may be smaller adjustments also being incorporated for other markets.

YTD, from memory from the NPD thread, all consoles other than 3DS are within 5% of NPD or thereabouts. That's not under / over tracking. That is within tolerance / margin for error given both are estimates. As has been said repeatedly, the only hard data is quarterly shipment numbers. It's only when VGC is way out of whack with the shipment numbers that one can really claim significant over or under tracking. But even then there's a fairly decent margin. No console has shipments running exactly in parallell with consumer demand, so stock on shelves / in warehouses will fluctuate, sometimes the fluctuations are quite wide. It's only when VGC LTD > shipments LTD that you know there is an absolute error which demands adjustment.

You need to appreciate that weekly sales error > yearly sales error > LTD sales error. I'm pretty confident that LTD sales here on VGC for all the consoles (except maybe 3DS given it's early days for that console) is within a few percent of actual sell through. It all depends on what statistical accuracy you want as to whether you're prepared to take VGC numbers at face value. For something as unimportant in the grand scheme of things as sales of gaming consoles I'm happy with a 95% confidence in a 90% accuracy. I imagine though that given VGC is trying to sell it's data to investment analysts and other people in the business of making money out of video games they'd be wanting something more like a 99% confidence in 95% accuracy. I would think that on a multi-year moving average the yearly data, for HW at least, would give a 99% confidence in 95% accuracy, and for LTD it probably well exceeds 95% accuracy with 99% confidence.

What's 99% confidence in 95% accuracy? As we are in the Americas thread we'll look at the most popular console. 2010 (latest full year) 360 = 8,308,470. So if VGC numbers are to be reasonably credible then we should be 99% confident that the true (but unknown by anyone) 2010 360 sales in Americas was somewhere between 415K above or below that figure. If we look at LTD of 33,565,446 then we should be 99% confident that the true sales figure is within  1.68 million either side of that figure.

Sales for any given week have nothing against which you can verify or check accuracy, because no independant organisations outside of Japan routinely report weekly console sales. So VGC could be out by 20% on some weeks and there's no way to detect that error.

If people are here expecting 100% accuracy then they're either stupid, ignorant or unreasonable, or a combination of the 3. And we all know the word for people who are dismissive of the potential error in once console and bitterly complain about the potential error in another console.